October 11, 2012

The Cape Cod Mushroom Expert.

The mushrooms were out this weekend in Cape Cod. So was this fellow. We were on a remote trail heading to a lighthouse and came across him. I thought he might live out in the sand dunes and wondered what he was foraging for with his basket in hand. "Mushrooms," he announced simply and with emphasis. He held one out for us to see. It was a beauty all right. The basket seemed rather empty otherwise. "Those vultures got the rest - those European vultures." Xavier liked that one. We learned that some of the poisonous mushrooms about had the power to kill four people if consumed (a single one) - kidney failure, no known antidote. After meeting up with him, we continued on and the rest of the weekend was peppered with cries of, "look, another kind!" With our primed eyes we discovered more and more varieties of mushrooms on our many walks. We would all get down on the ground, hovering near the mushrooms to capture them with our lenses - sometimes caressing their tops. "Don't put your fingers in Colette's mouth!" I yelled up to Stephen, ahead on the trail, who had Colette in the pack. He was insulted - of course he had thought of that, even if moonman and his fingers had been all over the mushrooms (moonman tells the Cape Cod story well).